In light of the jury verdict in Apple vs. Samsung, the one-liners and jokes flew back and forth. One in particular, by Dan Frakes, has been copied and pasted all over the web, and it goes like this: "When the iPhone debuted, it was widely criticized for having no buttons/keys. Now people think the iPhone's design is 'obvious'." This is a very common trend in this entire debate that saddens me to no end: the iPhone is being compared to simple feature phones, while in fact, it should be compared to its true predecessor: the PDA. PDAs have always done with few buttons.

Surely, the whole "buttonless" idea was obvious since the invention of the television...

People had been finding ways of getting rid of buttons for decades. Voice control, styluses, trackballs, the Etch-a-Sketch. The iP(hone|([ao]d)) still has buttons, but they are now displayed on screen.

In much the same way, humanity has progressed from thousands of gods to just a few, then to one and now there's a movement to get rid of the last one.

It's ridiculous to assert with a straight face that it wasn't obvious that the mathematical operation of subtraction would lead to buttonless devices.